J. D. Vance’s Very Weird Views About Women
7 min read
If you’re a woman without children, you already know that some people regard you as a lesser being. You must be miserable—despite some research that shows that single, childless women are the happiest group of all. You must be unfulfilled—despite the enormous expansion in career and social opportunities for women in the past half century. You must be unnatural—what kind of woman lacks a maternal instinct?
Normally, people who hold these opinions are at least polite enough to keep their views to themselves. Not so J. D. Vance. Ever since Donald Trump chose the senator from Ohio as his vice-presidential pick, past comments capturing Vance’s obsession with female fertility keep resurfacing. The Republicans clearly wanted to introduce Vance to the American public as the guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy, but instead, his first big splash came from his 2021 claim on Fox News that “childless cat ladies” are running the country. The best cleanup effort that Vance’s wife, Usha, could manage is that critics were focusing too much on a three-word “quip.”
Yet Vance’s back catalog is extensive. In the years immediately before his 2022 bid for the Senate, Vance—a convert to both Catholicism and Trumpism—displayed an odd fixation on fertility. In 2020, he did not demur when the podcast host Eric Weinstein asserted that helping care for youngsters was “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory.” (Vance’s spokesperson later said the media was “dishonestly putting words in J. D.’s mouth.”) The next year, Vance suggested that parents should have “more power—you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic—than people who don’t have kids.” He also tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people.”
In 2021, he told a Christian group, “So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids, trying to brainwash the minds of our children.” Did he really “hate to be so personal”? Come on. The comments were directed at Randi Weingarten, the leader of the powerful American Federation of Teachers. Weingarten, he added, “doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the mind of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
Weingarten is the stepmother to her wife’s adult kids, which National Review says does not count because she “cannot claim to have raised children.” Now, let’s be generous to Vance and assume that Weingarten’s sexuality has nothing to do with his repeated suggestions that she has no business being around children. Nonetheless, his criticism of educators without biological children is peculiar in the circumstances. First, Vance’s faith has a long tradition of convent schools, run by childless nuns. I went to one, and I would like to see him run his mouth like this in front of Sister Marie and Sister Mary Joseph. Second, the attacks on Weingarten are hard to reconcile with wider conservative talking points on employment criteria. Vance is suggesting that only people with lived experience of parenthood should run a teachers’ union. So much for hiring based on merit rather than personal identity characteristics.
But Vance is not just one man with an overdeveloped interest in women’s plumbing. Instead, the senator represents a strain of reactionary anti-feminism among the very online right that has, in recent years, seeped into the Republican mainstream. Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have also used Weingarten’s childless status as a punch line. What bothers me most about Vance’s provocative statements is not the joyless misogyny, but the absence of rigor. He lacks either the reasoning skills or the courage to follow his ideas to their logical conclusions. In Arizona last week, he was asked about affordable child care. It was “such an important question,” he said, before musing that “maybe Grandma and Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more.” Finally, someone has identified America’s fundamental economic problem: lazy grandparents! Definitely a winning campaign message. (Afterward, Vance added that “Americans are much poorer because they’re paying out the wazoo for day care.”)
Meanwhile, the idea of menopause as an evolutionary adaptation is a legitimate (if disputed) anthropological concept called “the grandmother hypothesis.” This theory suggests that human children are more likely to survive if they have alloparents—people who take care of them apart from their mother and father. Stop for a moment, and you’ll notice that this is actually an argument against the naturalness of the nuclear family, which Republican politicians tend to champion in all other circumstances. Time to join a lesbian commune!
Or consider the plan to give more votes to parents, to take account of their children’s interests. Vance has recently been keen to stress that he never proposed a bill to enact this, probably because five minutes’ consideration reveals that it is a preposterous idea. What if a child’s parents vote different ways—do they get half a vote each? What about sperm donors? What about so-called deadbeat dads? How would this policy acknowledge the fact that fathering 12 kids—as Elon Musk has—is far easier than gestating and nursing them are? Are we really suggesting that Thomas Jefferson, who fathered children with Sally Hemings, whom he held in slavery, was morally superior to the childless George Washington? (Remember, helping raise Martha Washington’s children doesn’t count.) The list goes on.
Extra votes for parents sounds to me like a half-baked scheme, an airy little nothingburger intended merely to gesture at the 1950s ideal of the man as the head of the household, a puffed-up general of his own living room, whose wife and kids fall in line as loyal foot soldiers. But one man’s half-baked scheme is another’s “thought experiment,” which is how Vance described his comments this summer. That semi-serious intellectual distancing is a typical move by the very online right, whose members like to singe their fingers by handling incendiary ideas, while maintaining plausible deniability that they actually believe them.
For a more extreme example than extra votes for parents, look at Vance’s friend Tucker Carlson, who reportedly helped sell Trump on picking the senator as a vice-presidential candidate. Carlson recently interviewed Darryl Cooper, a podcaster who claimed that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War, and who framed the German extermination camps as a regrettable logistical failure rather than the result of a detailed plan for Jewish genocide.
Vance is due to appear onstage with Carlson in the swing state of Pennsylvania later this month. When asked about the Cooper interview, Vance replied: “We believe in free speech and debate … The Democrats used to be the party where if you had an idea you didn’t like, you pushed back against it, you fought back against it, you criticized it.” This would be a reasonable sentiment if Carlson had contested Cooper’s claims on the podcast. Instead, he described his guest as possibly “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” The very online right has been poisoned by the belief that if a statement inspires revulsion, it must be worth discussing.
That milieu, which exerts ever more influence over conservative politicians, is littered with in-house intellectuals who see it as a badge of honor to publicly entertain unpopular opinions—restore the monarchy; bring back eugenics; Jews are too powerful; miscegenation is bad. Well, unpopular opinions for 2024, anyway. These views would have been celebrated in the upper-class drawing rooms of the 1900s. Feminist shibboleths are an appealing target for internet conservatives, because they offer exactly the kind of Ooh, the woke won’t let you say that quality on which these provocateurs thrive.
To this crowd, everything is just one big juicy thought experiment—even though evidence abounds that, if given the chance, Vance and his allies would happily enact policies to control women’s fertility. In many states, the Republican Party has repeatedly promoted abortion bans and proposed restrictions on IVF. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for conservative rule, suggests even more draconian measures, such as punitive regulation of manufacturers of abortion pills. Put together, this message sounds like: You must have children, but don’t expect any state help, and then when your fertile years are over, you may stay alive on sufferance to raise the next generation too. No wonder the polls show a gender gap. I’m only surprised it’s not bigger.
The trouble for Vance is that women don’t want to go back in time. Yes, many women are unhappy as a result of the struggle required to hold down a job as well as raise a family. But full-time homemakers were plenty unhappy too, as anyone who has read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique could tell you. Indeed, Vance acknowledged this in his interview with Weinstein, saying: “It’s super important that we not idealize especially the 1950s version of an American housewife, because, as my grandma told me, it was very lonely.” In the 1970s, when a generation of women was offered the chance for more financial independence, most of them took it. In 1950, only 18 million American women worked; by 2000, 66 million did. Women in Nashville or Newark don’t want to have an average of six children each—as women do in Niger, the country with the highest fertility rate. Birth rates have fallen across the developed world. If given the choice, women don’t want to spend their entire life pregnant or nursing.
Vance is nowhere near as extreme as some of the people he follows on X or appears with onstage. But theirs is the intellectual tradition from which he has sprung. He is part of a carousel of self-styled grand thinkers, whose grand thoughts just so happen to end up in the same place as their Victorian forebears’ did. Sometimes these guys should ask themselves: Am I really a cutting-edge heterodox thinker, or am I just 100 years late to these opinions?
